Keywords: LessTif

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# 1. Introduction

This chapter gives a cursory explanation of the way XmStrings are encoded in M*TIF 1.2 (and LESSTIF). This information is still being discovered, so explanations of where it is wrong are welcome.

Sometime last year on the LESSTIF mailing list, a well known SGI persona, Doug Rand, sent an email that described the things that were changed from 1.2 to 2.0. One of the things he mentioned was that the encoding rules for the external representation of XmStrings can no longer be considered to be in ASN.1 format (ASN means ``Abstract Syntax Notation Number One''). If you wonder why there is a full stop in the acronym - there's a simple reason for it. First written as ``ASN1'' many people just misread it as ASNI (note the letter ``I'' and not the digit ``1'' at the end). And this rapidly mutated into ANSI, what was probably not meant at all. So the OSI wrote it with a full stop and no-one every confused it with the ANSI anymore.

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